It is that time of year when companies report how well the second quarter went for them, and for AMD, it apparently went exceptionally well. Last year the company's revenue for Q2 was $1.15 billion but this year it achieved $1.76 billion, which is an increase of 53% year-over-year. The company's net income for the quarter was $116 million, which is a significant improvement over last year when it lost $42 million in Q2.

Intel too posted a positive quarter, totaling $17 billion year-over-year improvement, with $8.7 billion coming from its PC-centric business. The remainder came from its data-centric groups, producing a 51%-49% split between the two.

Also coming out with these results are the earnings calls with some information about how the companies are operating and what we might expect in the future. AMD revealed it has increased its research and development budget by 25% since a year ago, which is interesting as the Zen architecture, fueling its increased revenue, was developed with such limited resources. Zen 2, the next CPU architecture coming from the company will be produced on a 7 nm manufacturing node, which is something we have known for some time, but what is interesting is that it has been TSMC creating the Rome EPYC chips currently being sampled. GlobalFoundries has long been the manufacturer AMD has worked with, especially as it used to be AMD's manufacturing arm before being spun off. The target is to release Zen 2-based EPYC processors in the first half of 2019, potentially Q2.

For Intel the news for upcoming products and moving to a new manufacturing node is not so positive. For some time Intel has been working on getting its 10 nm process up and running, but it has been constantly running into issues. The new expectation is that mass production of 10 nm parts will begin in time for H2 2019, so we might be looking at Q4 2019 for availability in OEM systems. Until then, we can expect Intel to continue using its very successful 14 nm process.

What this adds up to is AMD is having significant success and it appears that next year will have its products on a new manufacturing node months ahead of Intel. Intel has been leading in manufacturing technologies for years, so it looks like 2019 will be a very interesting year for, at least, CPUs.

I like to see AMD improving their bottom line. I like it a lot.
The numbers are still wildly disproportionate, but AMD is doing better in a market that was squeezing the life out of them before Ryzen came along.
Competition is king and I'm glad to see more of it.